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Comment by vimy | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a movement now in the West to ban plastic bags and put higher taxes on plastics among other things. This is pointless as the West is only responsible for a tiny fraction of the plastic waste in our oceans.

The study linked in the article claims that "The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88−95% of the global load into the sea." Those rivers are: Chang Jiang, Indus, Huang He, Hai He, Nile, Bramaputra, Zhujiang, Amur, Niger and Mekong. Eight in Asia, two in Africa.

To put it bluntly, these are regions where most people don't know the meaning of the word recycling. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368

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You'll be surprised to know then it's not just the "West" that considers it a problem. Here's the Indian state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, introducing a plastic bag ban and deposit on PET bottles.[1]

1. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/ban-comes-in...

While I don't think it really refutes your point; are you aware of the minimum charge on plastic bags introduced in England? It practically overnight reduced the number of plastic bags used by 80%.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-use-plasti...

I don't see why this wouldn't work just as well in other parts of the world (obviously scaled to a reasonable price level compared to average income).

> This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.

Its about poverty. Almost none of the communities that border these rivers will have access to organised waste disposal, never mind recycling. So the trash goes into the river. Thats bad, and I suspect that its known to be bad by the people involved, but where are the alternatives?

Check out [1] for some pretty horrifying descriptions of what plastic pollution is doing to coastal communities in Cambodia. Quote: "according to Water.Org, about four million people in Cambodia still lack access to safe water, leaving them with no alternative but to buy endless bottled water, perpetuating the environmentally destructive cycle. [...] this plastic waste that all the people here live amongst is unavoidable- they are not about to feed their babies the black muddy liquid that comes out of the taps, it’s poison.”

Clearly the solution involves people not throwing plastic into the rivers, but labelling dirt-poor people in a poisoned environment as having a "cultural problem" isn't going to help.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/mountains-and-...

How is being poor an excuse for throwing your trash in the river? A cart, a horse and you have a garbage truck. Add some plot of land where you can dump the garbage and you have the mvp of a garbage management system. I'm having a hard time believing these countries can't afford such a simple system.

Naming the problem is step one in fixing it. Our efforts are better focused helping these countries fix their garbage problem. That won't happen if everyone here keeps thinking we are the origin of all that ocean plastic.

> A cart, a horse and you have a garbage truck. Add some plot of land where you can dump the garbage and you have the mvp of a garbage management system. I'm having a hard time believing these countries can't afford such a simple system.

Who pays for it? Cambodia's per-capita GDP is just under UD$1300. A third of the country earns less than US$1.90 a day. Its a poor country. From a developed-word perspective it makes sense to collect the trash, but their perspective may be very different.

> Naming the problem is step one in fixing it. Our efforts are better focused helping these countries fix their garbage problem. That won't happen if everyone here keeps thinking we are the origin of all that ocean plastic.

I agree.

Not trying to be callous, but that low GDP would mean that hiring a garbage man would be correspondingly inexpensive.

> Almost none of the communities that border these rivers will have access to organised waste disposal

Does anyone have any deeper reading on this? I've spent a few years backpacking and Myanmar was by far the worst offender when it came to trash flowing down it's rivers and streams.

I know they don't have trash systems in place, and they often dump it in piles and burn it. What is happening around moving towards some kind of centralized landfills? Even basic pickup? Trucks and fuel are cheap relatively speaking. How do we move to the next step?

Getting them to reduce is ideal but very hard.

Much of that plastic discharge is from manufacturing of goods that will be consumed in the West. Economic and environmental policies in these places are exploited by Western businesses

Simple blaming it on the culture of a people seems myopic

The West isn't forcing them to dump everything on the street or in their rivers. That's on them. Besides, if you look at pictures or videos of rivers drowning in plastic, it doesn't look like industrial waste at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PavA4rUypE

The west isn't forcing them, but it's choosing them for manufacturing because they are the cheapest. One reason they are cheap is because of no environmental regulation.

There's a great documentary on YouTube about the ship breaking industry in Sri Lanka. Rich nations selling old ships for scrap to a very poor nation who couldn't care less about the environment or workers rights. Much better to dump it there than in a western nation where asbestos must be mitigated and oily pipes can't be welded on the beach.

See also China. Especially a few years ago when their "smoggy cities" photos were making headlines. The west chides them on their pollution, yet where do all your consumer devices come from and why do they come from there and not your country ? Of course they're more polluted when they do most of the manufacturing for the world.

>Of course they're more polluted when they do most of the manufacturing for the world.

The United States, European Union, and Japan all manufacture more than China and are comparatively pristine.

It's time to stop playing the "We're just poor China! You big bad Western countries are too hard on us!" card.

You're either a technological powerhouse, or not. Time to put on your big boy pants.

>Rich nations selling old ships for scrap to a very poor nation who couldn't care less about the environment or workers rights.

So... companies in rich nations should stop selling disused ships to companies poor nations, keeping them poor. Got it.

Lead by example

We are. We have recycling programs, we have fines and social pressure against littering, city workers cleaning the streets. Those simple things can reduce almost 90 % of ocean plastic.

What is the problem with implementing bag taxes/bans then? Even if it’s simply symbolic, don’t you think it sets a good example for the rest of the world and further ingrains the idea of “reduce, reuse, recycle” in our own societies?

Because it's worse for the environment to ban plastic. And who likes to be taxed more? A new Danish study claims that low-density polyethylene (LDPE) has the smallest impact on the environment. Meaning plastic bags are more environment-friendly than paper bags, bio-plastic bags or cotton bags.

"The use of a unbleached paper bag is equivalent, as it needs to be recycled 43 times, a bag made of renewable PP needs to be recycled 45 times, and a cotton-bag has to be brought to the supermarket and back up to 7100 times (and around 20,000 times, if the cotton is organic),to assure the environmental impact is similar to the LDPE-bag."

https://stateofgreen.com/en/profiles/state-of-green/news/pla...

It might be worth a small increase in CO2 emissions to reduce plastic pollution TBH. We have other ways to offset those extra CO2 emissions, plenty of waste to cut. But once plastic and particularly microplastic pollution is in water and the food chain it's going to be nigh impossible to remove it.

> A new Danish study claims that low-density polyethylene (LDPE) has the smallest impact on the environment.

"In general, LDPE carrier bags, which are the bags that are always available for purchase in Danish supermarkets, are the carriers providing the overall lowest environmental impacts when not considering reuse."

(emphasis mine)

> We have recycling programs

Most recycling centers bundle plastic up into barges and ship them overseas where they may end up being partially recycled and partially in the ocea. There's often too much contamination to properly recycle. China has also recently stopped taking in these plastic barges so many municipalities don't have anywhere to put this except the city dump.

> We have recycling programs

Not all cities in the US participate in recycling programs equally. The overall US plastic recycling rate is still only 31%. Many states (maybe most?) don't have a plastic bottle deposit program.

>Many states (maybe most?) don't have a plastic bottle deposit program.

Most. The few places that do are:

California, Connecticut, Guam, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont.

Source: http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...

Having just visited Vietnam, this logic no longer makes any sense to me and I’m not sure how it ever did. Standards we set many decades ago for ourselves aren’t even close to being followed in that country. I can see no reason to believe why any future restrictions on ourselves will be any different.

Not to mention the fact that the correct handling of garbage (so it ends up in the appropriate processing plant or landfill rather than the ocean) is vastly more sensible, effective, and economical than regulating plastic use.

Here in France grocery store can't give you plastic bags for free. And even most shops will sell you the paper bags.

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